


protector of the lost

by schrodingers__cat



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Gen, Slight spoilers, Speculation, but nothing all that specific, dangit I guess this is an au now as of episode 94, even the traveler doesn’t know what the frick he is, hints that he is or used to be some sort of fey, let him love jester very much !!, let the traveler be good !!, well maybe it kind of still works
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-03
Updated: 2020-02-03
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:47:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22534951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/schrodingers__cat/pseuds/schrodingers__cat
Summary: He opens his eyes, and breathes.There is no air in his lungs—there are no lungs. There are no eyes, either, but he wakes all the same.
Relationships: Jester Lavorre & The Traveler, The Traveler & The Mighty Nein
Comments: 16
Kudos: 111





	protector of the lost

He opens his eyes, and breathes. 

There is no air in his lungs—there are no lungs. There are no eyes, either, but he wakes all the same. 

There isn’t much of anything. He was from somewhere—or was he? He was going someplace—or away from something? 

He didn’t know. There was nothing to know. 

There’s a place in his nonexistent chest that aches, like a blade made of vapor pierced it through and all the _something_ he once was bled out. 

He is so much nothing, and in front of him, around him, is so much everything. 

There is nowhere to go, and everywhere to be, but he doesn’t know. He can’t know. How could he know?

 _Lost,_ the word flickers in his newly-remade mind. _I’m lost._

—————

The forests around him are green, so he is green to match. He isn’t sure he has a face, so he hides it. 

What’s the purpose in faces, anyway? With a face, he couldn’t slip away unnoticed, irrelevant. With a face, he has an identity. It’s so much more fun without one. 

(And besides—he couldn’t remember what he looked like if he tried.)

There are people around him, and he feels kinship with them. They breathe air as he does, but they need it. They have the lungs to need it. He has hands like they do, and they are familiar and useful. 

There are great cities and wondrous sights. Every sight is a wondrous sight—the grandest towers, the smallest creature. The people he passes are everywhere all at once, and he revels in the noise and sound. The _fun._ The fun he can create—making things where they shouldn’t be. A painting just slightly tilted. All the furniture a bit to the left. Products in a shop not quite where they should be. 

He finds he still likes the road. There’s very little for him to change here, because _she_ who is the wilderness (he can feel her, hear her humming) does not know order. Order is her lover, but she does not know it. 

There’s so much everything, out on the road. 

_”Ho, traveler!”_ fellow wanderers call out to him. He finds he likes the title.

—————

He who is now the Traveler has not found his way. 

He is lost, lost, lost, lost in this ocean city of wondrous beauty and terrible birds (which he admire greatly. Their sheer _audacity!_ )

He didn’t know he was searching for something until he found it, soul burning bright like a beacon. This new thing that he’d become said _that one, that one’s like me._

She’s small and she’s blue, and he watches for a while. 

Unsure. 

He’s not often unsure. 

She carefully builds a tower of wooden blocks, and knows exactly which blocks to take out so that the whole contraption comes tumbling down. The wooden flooring is scratched terribly, and a few blocks fall on her head, but she’s giggling. 

He smiles, and it’s honest—that’s something new. 

_A child,_ his mind provides. _She is a child._

He is drawn to her, for reasons he can’t quite explain but thinks he should be able to. (He is nothing, and she is something.)

Hardly realizing it, he shrinks down to match, softening his wander-worn features. The cloak remains—he’s not sure what he would do without it. 

He speaks without speaking, glimmering, floating. Lets his visibility-invisibility fade, so his visage belongs only to her. 

_“Hello! What’s your name?”_

Her smile is so terribly joyful, and the Traveler finds something there that he knows so awfully well. 

She’s _lonely_. (She’s _lost_.)

_”I’m Jester!”_

—————

Little Jester gives him many things. 

She gives him something like the childhood he can’t remember, as he lets himself grow along with her. She gives him shape. She makes him _something._

Where he was nothing (empty, lost) he is now mischief, because she is mischief, and they both so love to have fun. What was once only scattered became chaotic, became a smirk on his face and a poke on her nose. 

She needed a friend, so he became one. 

The sparkles and lollipops and paints and sketches add upon the dirt roads and wanderers and shape him into something bright. Clever. Odd. Proud. 

Oh-so-very proud, of this little girl that made him.

And then she wasn’t so little anymore, and neither was he. 

————-

When his Jester’s mother kisses her forehead and strokes her hair and sends her on her way, tears in her eyes, he follows her. The road is a part of him, familiar to him, and he guides her. 

She needs power, and he gives it to her. It is glowing, it is bright, and it is _healing._ For some reason, he wasn’t expecting that. 

The wellspring within him is greater than he thought, and as she wanders and experiments, so does he.

—————

And so the Traveler lives up to his name once more. 

He’s still having trouble with the whole multilocation thing, though. 

He can feel every road. Every wanderer, every roamer. He finds himself guiding, being asked for guidance (though the askers don’t usually know who they are asking). He is with every mischievous prankster giggling at their own genius. Every lonely child in need of a friend. 

(Everyone that is lost.)

He follows his little Jester wherever she goes, because she precious and good and clever but awfully naive. And he finds others, those souls that are pinpricks in his nonexistent-heart, and binds them to him. He watches over them. (He does not follow them.) 

—————

He realizes what he’s doing is called _godhood_ when the Raven Queen comes to call. 

Her mask is porcelain and her hair is night-dark. She is taller than him, but at least she isn’t twenty feet tall (like he was rather expecting). She has no true name, but that’s alright—neither does he.

She radiates... not _sympathy,_ she has never been a kind goddess, but... _understanding_. She tells him what no one else bothered to—about balance and law and power and limits. 

She claims he is an oddity— _uncelestial_ , whatever that means. But she also claims that it doesn’t matter. 

She says, _the others do not like us, we who have built ourselves from nothing. You must find your own way._

He knows.

She breathes, as he does, though neither of them need to. Strange—how habits remain. How air rhythmically fills lungs that don’t exist. 

—————

He doesn’t know when he became a protector. 

Was it the moment his Jester stepped out into the unknown for the first time? Was it when she met the tuskless half-drowned half-orc, bound to the ocean’s terrors? Was it a simple, indistinct morning in a tavern, whispering of destiny? That first battle with the fiend? Any of the subsequent battles afterward? When they lost their purple demon, mischievous-but-kind, who’d gained the Traveler’s favor and never knew it? 

He doesn’t know. 

But—these seven oddities somehow remake him _again_ into something new. 

He watches over Jester like he always has, but he finds himself deflecting an arrow away from the little ungoblin’s chest. Scattering flowers on the road near the barbarian woman, decay for the firbolg. Brushing comforting fingertips over the wizard’s forehead in the night, putting an invisible hand on the half-orc’s shoulder. Catching a bolt the monk girl wasn’t able to. 

They are travelers, wanderers. 

(They were all once lost.)

He finds himself sharing this space. 

The Wildmother is so all-encompassing that she hardly notices him, most of the time. Sometimes she sees him, small and cloaked and shimmering, and she nods—but that is rare. Her vines trail around the firbolg and the half-orc, fungus and wildflowers growing from their souls. The Traveler cloaks them just the same. 

The Stormlord is... petty, if the Traveler’s being honest. _Upstart_ , he calls him. _Imposter. Fair-being in unfair skin, playing with power that you don’t deserve._

The Traveler could care less, to be quite frank. But the Stormlord’s lighting flickers and flares in the distance, and his tempests scare away bandits and creatures in the night. The Traveler stays silent and shields the companions from the rain. 

(She needed a protector, so he became one.)

—————

He wants to gather them all together, these scattered-lost-joyful-clever people that made him what he is. 

(God of wanderers, roamers, travelers. Roads and paths and disorder and anonymity. Pranks and mischief and phallic symbols in secret places. Seekers of homes and lonely children. Protector of the lost.) 

There are plans to be made, so many plans, and by the gods he’s still so _bad_ at multilocation. But there’s something in his chest as he presses gemstones into volcanic walls and hangs glittering strings. 

It takes him far too long to recognize it as excitement.

**Author's Note:**

> (holds up the traveler) I just think he’s neat !!!


End file.
